Steve Varsano examines a private jet that diverted from a one-hour LA-to-San Francisco flight to Hawaii instead. A Bombardier Challenger 3500 carries just enough fuel for its planned route plus reserves, so a mid-flight 2,000-nautical-mile diversion would require pre-planning, not an emergency decision.
A private jet on a short 1-hour flight from LA to San Francisco stopped midway and diverted all the way to Hawaii on Friday.
It is a little bit odd. I mean, first of all, didn't stop midway. Maybe it changed direction because airplanes usually only carry enough fuel to go a little bit further than their destination. This is because it costs money to carry more fuel than you really need. Sometimes if the place you're going to is much more expensive to buy fuel, you'll— what they call tanker fuel— you'll bring more fuel there. But it would be weird because it's a 5-hour trip going from California to Hawaii. So this airplane really needed to be really preplanned to have enough fuel to go that far on a Bombardier Challenger 3500. The Challenger 3500, that has a range about 3,000 nautical miles, which is about a 6-hour flight. So really going halfway up to San Francisco and then deciding to go to Hawaii, this is really questionable because there's not any place you can stop on the way from California to Hawaii. And if you're going to be running out of fuel, which you'll know halfway there, if you have to turn around and come back or not. But they should have probably known that. But it's odd that they would just turn mid-flight to go that far away.
Part of Van recognized at roughly 6:30 PM UTC, then began heading northwest, as you'd expect, toward its scheduled arrival of San Francisco. After being in the air for roughly only 30 minutes, it begins its diversion and starts heading almost directly west all the way to Hawaii.
Listen, there's two things here. One is the person on the airplane had a business call and all of a sudden had to change his plans instantaneously to go to Hawaii for some kind of emergency situation. But that's the flexibility that you can have being on corporate jet. It's not really common where you see an airplane mid-flight change direction. I mean, there's obviously— you have Wi-Fi and you have telephone contact on a corporate jet most of the time, not all of the time. And if you have connection all the time and plans change, sometimes you do divert and go to a different location. Unfortunately, when you have other people on the airplane, they have to go where the boss goes. And that's the possible flexibility you get with a corporate jet. Obviously, you can never do that on an airliner unless you're going to hijack it.
